Project: Bitwise Splitting and Merging of Pixels
 Artist: Kenji Kojima, 2024 - 2023

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 | The Four Variations of Artwork |

1. 2. 3. 4.



| Preliminary Studies |

5. 6. 7. 8.



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            プロジェクト「ピクセルのビットごとの分割と結合」は、「生成AIの急速な発展で、これまでデジタルアートを創作してきたアーティストは、今何ができるのか？」という問いから始まりました。 現在、すべてのメディアはバイナリで記録されています。 このプロジェクトはワンタイム パッドと呼ばれる暗号化技術を使用して、すべての元の画像のバイナリー・データに、乱数によるビットごとの XOR 演算を実行することで、色情報を暗号化しています。 その結果、画像は暗号を解く鍵と暗号との2つのデータに分かれた状態になります。 アーティストの小島健治は、自分の周りの世界は混沌とした情報に満ちていると信じています。 目や耳の感覚器官は、混沌の中から視覚情報や聴覚情報などの特定の要素だけを、フィルターのように抽出して世界を構築します。 私たちはまるで暗号を解読するかのように、感覚器官の「鍵」を使って世界を構築します。しかしこれは科学的な手法を使ったアートのメタファーで、実践的な科学ではありません。
            このプロジェクトは、フランスのポスト印象派の画家ジョルジュ・スーラからインスピレーションを得ました。 スーラは、人間の目で色の要素を混ぜることによって作り出される、色について考察しました。 各色には、赤、緑、青の光の情報が含まれています。 混沌とした色のモザイクは、キーに一致する乱数を使用してデコードされ、元の画像になります。 アーティストの小島は、カオスから得られる視覚情報には聴覚情報も混じっていると考えているので、画像データの音楽変換も試みました。さらに、デジタルアートの最大の特徴は、本物のアート・ワークを無制限に複製できることです。 本物のアート作品が無制限にコピーされれば、その金銭的価値は消滅してしまいます。 彼は資本主義に埋め込まれたアートの異常な金融商品化した状況を解消し、アートに別の意味を与えようとしています。 金銭的価値がなくなってもアートに意味があれば、鑑賞者とのつながりが復活できると考えています。
            このウェブぺージを作成した現在（2024年3月）。作品２「A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte」は、ニューヨーク市「All Street Gallery」 のサイトでオンライン・ソロショー。作品３「Wheat Field with Cypresses 」は、フランス、ツゥールーズ市で開催中のメディア・フェスティバル「Rencontres Internationales Traverse」 に参加しています。

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Project Description:

            The project "Bitwise Splitting and Merging of Pixels" started in 2023. Likely, the artwork "Begins with Chaos - Lascaux / 5:00" (version 3) represents the final format of this project. There are eight variations of the artwork on this page. The visual theme of the artwork "Lascaux" draws inspiration from the mural paintings of the Lascaux Cave in France. Cave walls were humanity's first canvases; now they serve as digital screens. The project explores themes of human sensation and perception, spanning from the evolution of life and prehistoric cave paintings to the modern era where all data is recorded in binary. It encompasses various themes such as "Chaos and Order," "Perception and Cognition," and "New Value Created by Technology."

            The artist Kenji Kojima believes that the world around him is full of chaotic information. In evolution, we have slowly and slowly repeated generations to develop the five senses as a function to grasp the environment for survival. Humans use their eyes to perceive the shape and color of the outside world. How do creatures in the deep sea without eyes perceive the outside world? Or maybe skin plays that role. Bats perceive three-dimensional space through sound waves. We trust the information provided by the five senses, so we may ignore the capabilities of other sense organs. Sense organs construct the world by extracting only certain components from the chaos, such as visual and auditory information, like a filter. It is that you construct your world with the "key" of a sense organ as if you were deciphering a code.

            The chaotically arranged color mosaic that appears in the video is an encrypted image created by bitwise XOR operations of random numbers on the color information of a given image using a cryptographic technique. Each square contains Red, Green, and Blue information. There is another random number of data with the same amount of information, but it is not displayed as an image on this video screen. The random numbers can be seen as binary values displayed on the video screen during the image decoding process. This random number can be thought of as a key for encrypted images.

            The mosaics in this project are inspired by optical color mixing rather than the physical arrangement of mixed colors on canvas. The project aims to recreate the original image by mixing color elements, as Georges Seurat did. This uses a cryptographic technique called a one-time pad to encrypt color information by performing a bitwise XOR operation on all image data with random numbers. In other words, it can be said to be separated into the code-breaking key (random numbers) and the code (colored images of randomly arranged squares).

            The chaotic mosaic of colors is decoded using random numbers that match the key and becomes a painting in the original painting. The artist Kojima feels that the visual information obtained from chaos is also mixed with auditory information. The project of Lascaux's next stage was to obtain the color information from the paintings in binary form and attempt to convert it into a musical scale. He explored the relationship between color and music, as Russian composer Alexander Slyabin and painter Wassily Kandinsky had attempted to express. He set the center of the RGB value to be the middle C of the piano keyboard, automatically assigning it to the 12-tone scale. In the video, RGB values are randomly sampled from five locations, and musical notes are made from those values and played on the piano, ocarina, and bell. Currently, all media, including visual and auditory ones, are converted into binary and recorded as data. The artist is considering the possibility of converting binary data into other formats, such as visual to auditory, as artwork.

            Artist Kojima believes that "NFT art" is not art, but a financial product. The greatest feature of digital art is that it allows unlimited reproduction of real works of art. If a real work of art could be copied infinitely, its monetary value would disappear. He is trying to eliminate the abnormal financial situation of art, which is embedded in capitalism, and give it a different meaning. If art had meaning even after its monetary value disappeared, it would revive the connection with the viewer. One of the main causes of environmental degradation is the greedy materialism of modernity. In this context, art is associated with the value of only one and the excessive worship of money. The first step in restoring the global environment is the restoration of art to a normal, respectable value by each artist and individual. Art must be reformed and lead to a new aesthetic value for our civilization.


Show: Kenji Kojima's Biography
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            Kenji Kojima was born in Japan. He moved to New York in 1980 and began his artistic career. For the first 10 years in New York City, he painted contemporary egg tempera paintings using medieval art materials and techniques. He was strongly attracted to contemporary art but felt stuck in the future of modern civilization and art with excessive material value. He tried to experience the history of the creation of the European concept of art through actual materials and techniques, that is, the history of art that is not written in literature. He was particularly interested in the basic materials of painting, such as ground, pigment, and medium, rather than the visual theme. He noticed that as society developed, people's minds expanded, materials and tools advanced, and the visual arts changed. Citibank, Hess Oil, and others have collected his egg tempera paintings.

            The personal computer improved rapidly during the 1980s. He felt more comfortable with computer art than paintings. Ecologically, he had felt guilty about wasting materials in the name of art. Working on the computer was clean, did not waste material, and made him feel lighter. In the early 1990s, he moved his artwork into the digital arts. He was particularly interested in developing interactive artworks. His early digital works were archived at the New Museum - Rhizome, New York. He studied computer programming himself. In 2007, he developed the computer software "RGB MusicLab" and created an interdisciplinary artwork that explores the relationship between images and music. He developed interactive software for his art but soon ran into a big problem. the software would not run on the new operating systems. He shot the artwork to video while the software ran on the operating system. He started making videos, not only about programming art but also about ecological issues in art by shooting videos. His digital art series has been shown at media art festivals worldwide, including Europe, South America, the Middle East, Asia, and the USA.

            After COVID-19, he could not go out to shoot a video, but he found numerous archival artworks online. He launched a new series titled "The Musical Interpretation of Paintings" which transforms classical image data such as paintings, photographs, and films into music. Artist Kojima believes that the sensory organs construct the world by extracting only certain components from the chaos, such as visual and auditory information, like a filter. So we create our world with the "key" of the sensory organs as if we were deciphering a code. In 2023, "Bitwise Splitting and Merging of Pixels" began with the self-question, "With the development of generative AI, can we create visual art that is not an assemblage of past visual data? Currently, all media is recorded in binary form. This fact leads to the manipulation of color pixels using bitwise operations. He created encryption-decryption projects like "The Da Vinci Code" and others. In 2024 he started an Anthropocene and ecological participatory video art project called "This Planet is Our Home".

Kenji Kojima Resume


Digital Art Exhibitions:
the USA: 2024 OtoZono at HEART, New York. / 2024 the New Media Art Space at Baruch College, New York. / 2024 All Street, New York / 2023, 2020 Torrance Art Museum, Los Angeles, USA. / 2023 THE ELASTIC MIND, BROWARD College, Weston, Florida. / 2023 SOJOURNER, New York, NY. / 2022 Asian American International Film Festival, New York, NY. / 2012, 2016 Light Year, Brooklyn, New York. / 2021 UNCG International Sustainability Shorts Film Competition, UNC Greensboro, NC, USA. / 2019 The Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery, New jersey City University, Jersey City, NJ. / 2019, 2016, 2015 Williamsburg Art & Historical Center, New York, NY. / 2018 The Exchange, Bloomsburg, PA. 2018 WhiteBox, New York, NY. / 2015 ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community. / 2014 MediaNoche, New York, NY. / 2008 AC Institute, New York, NY.
 Europe: 2024 Profusion of Colors, A.E. Corner, Galleria di Tirano, Viale Italia / 2024 Summer of Anthropocene, The New Museum of Networked Art, Cologne, Germany / 2024 DIGITAL VIDEO ART INTERNATIONAL STREAMING FESTIVAL 'The films of the Official Selection 2024', Vienna, Austria / 2024 Technocene Berlin Templehof, Germany. / 2024 Open Media Art, Košice, Slovakia / 2024, 2023, 2022, 2020, 2019 Ie Rencontres Internationales Traverse, Toulouse, France. / 2021 FEX comtemporary media art, Cologne, Germany. / 2020 Institut für Alles Mögliche, Stützpunkt Teufelsberg, Belrin, Germany. / 2019 The festival BINNAR, Vila Nova de Famalicão, Portugal. / 2019 MADATAC X New Media Arts Festival, Madrid, Spain. / 2018 Athens Digital Arts Festival, Athen, Greece. / 2018 Mitte Media Festival, Berlin, Germany. / 2017 Simultan Festival, Timisoara, Romania. / 2016 Simultan Festival, Timisoara, Romania. / 2016 Brave New World Beyond the Wall, Berlin, Germany. / 2015, 2013 ESPACIO ENTER, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. / 2014 BRAVE NEW WORLD, Berlin, Germany. / 2011 Jyväskylä Art Museum, Jyväskylä, Finland. / 2010 PROCESS Festival, Berlin, Germany. / 2009 RE-NEW Digital Art Festival, Copenhagen, Denmark. / 2002 Free Manifest, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Brazil: 2023, 2022, 2020, 2016, 2012, 2011, 2010 FILE (Electronic Language International Festival) São Paulo, Brazil. / 2012 FILE RIO, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. / 2010 FAD (Festival de Arte Digital), Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
 the Middle East: 2020, 2012 Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, Turkey. / 2020, 2019 Paadmaan Video Event, Isfahan, Iran.
Asia: 2021 Thailand New Music and Arts Symposium, Bangkok, Thailand. / 2020 the 150th Anniversary Gandhi Event, Kolkata, India. / 2019 Capital Normal University College of Cape Cod, Beijing, China & China University of Mining and Technology Yinchuan College, Yinchuan, China. / 2018 Gunung Sunda Festival, Sukabumi, West Java, Indonesia. / 2016 CeC 2016, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong, Meghalaya, India. / 2010 Contemporary International New Media Art Invitational, Wuhan University of Technology, China.

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One-Time Pad Encoding: LiveCode Programing
A part of the programming of this project.

Project Application: Developed by Kenji Kojima
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